Board Approves Shopping Center

Reluctantly, Palm Beach County commissioners bit the bullet and approved a 208,700-square-foot shopping center at Lyons Road and Glades Road as Circuit Judge Mary Lupo recently ordered them to do.

Attorney Alan Ciklin filed suit last year after the Zoning Board rejected the rezoning request from his client, Carteret Savings and Loan Association, from agricultural to general commercial for the shopping center.

Lupo, after reading the transcript of the commission hearing, decided the commission`s decison was unreasonable, ``capricious and arbitrary,`` and remanded the case back to the county with an explicit order the request was to be approved.

Under state law, only a governing body, not a judge, can actually rezone property.

But, as Commissioner Dorothy Wilken pointed out, to reject the request again would place the commission in contempt of court and could land commissioners in jail.

Lupo`s ruling was based on the grounds offered by several commissioners last year in rejecting the project - a county planning staff study, released the day of the hearing, determined there was too much commercial zoning and not enough residential developments to provide a healthy balance.

Lupo said the commission acted on the study by, in effect, declaring a moratorium on commercial development west of Boca Raton without ever holding public hearings on a moratorium, as state law requires.

That meant the decision was based on a study that had not been aired publicly and, as such, was illegal, the judge said.

Commissioners, sitting as the Zoning Board Thursday, discussed the possibility of imposing stringent new conditions on the project, making them a condition of their approval.

If the developer objected, said Commissioner Ken Spillias, he could take the county to court again and Lupo would rule on them.

After toying with the idea for a while, commissioners asked Ciklin whether his client would agree to conditions prohibiting fast food restaurants and flashing signs, as requested by Fran Reich, president of the West Boca Community Council.

Ciklin said those would not be acceptable. He also refused Wilken`s proposal to agree to restrict restaurants to the center portion of the project, away from the Glades Road/Lyons Road intersection. Restaurants need to be along major roads for business reasons, he explained.

He did agree to prohibiting billboards and making the landscaping conform to the county`s latest landscape code.

Reich asked the board to consider some additional legal action to prevent the project from proceeding.

But Assistant County Attorney Sandra Sprague said her office had reviewed Lupo`s decision, handed down more than a month ago, and found no basis on which to appeal.

The transcript was laced with references to the staff study as a reason for rejecting the project, she said, noting only Spillias had stipulated at the time he was voting no for a different reason.